Alice Adams - To See You Again - Stories

Clover sighs. “I seem to be freshly out of gentlemen callers. I wonder, should I come alone? Or maybe I’ll bring Gregory. I sort of owe him an invitation, or something.”

“Whatever. On the other hand, though, maybe not Gregory Bald-Fat. Maybe we’d rather just think about him.”

Hanging up, Clover’s first emotion is a strong regret that she ever described Gregory to Hope and Josiah, that they have given him that name. She now feels uncomfortably disloyal, and to a man who has been tremendously helpful in her professional life. In fact, although low on lovers, as she puts it to herself, Clover has never worked so well, nor for that matter enjoyed her work so much.

The weather has been dull: gray skies, early mornings and nights of heavy fog, days of moist and heavy air. No real rain, or real cold. Clover can’t think what to wear to Hope’s and Josiah’s party. She thinks, I never know what to wear in February, meaning that she is tired of all the clothes she has worn all winter—meaning, really, that for the moment she is tired of going out.

“Gregory, you know my crazy friends, Hope and Josiah? Well, they’re having a party.” Clover has decided that she would rather go with Gregory than alone; she plans that with him she will simply appear for a short time.

But, “My dear Clover, I am most sorry. I have a dinner that night, old colleagues, impossible to get out of it,” says Gregory. “However, it will be an early evening. I could pick you up at ten, or ten-thirty, and go with you to the party of your friends?”

“Well, I’m afraid not. Dinner, they said. But I’m sorry, Gregory.”

“I too, dear Clover.”

Another of Josiah’s techniques for the discomfort of guests, along with the lack of comfortable furniture, is to serve rather little food and great quantities of cheap wine. This sits well with his innate penuriousness, and it reminds him of his student days at Berkeley, his happiest, even before he met Clover. Tonight he has made what he calls his Berkeley stew, which consists of a few shrimp, some green pepper and a little rice. Also, unlike most alcoholics, who tend to be bored with drunks, Josiah loves to watch them; he meticulously notes each stage of inebriation, from the first slurred syllable to the final lurch toward the bathroom.

Hope also feels that the food served at parties should be minimal, and the drinks very cheap. She always thought her rich parents vulgar in their display of imported foods, vintage wines. Josiah is right: how much better to serve a small simple stew and some California jug wine.

Thus, at the party, people as usual are still hungrily drinking wine after dinner, and some are drunk.

Clover, in a red silk dress (several years old, but she has always liked it), is neither hungry nor drunk. Having worked through most of the day, she forgot about lunch until late afternoon, when she ravenously devoured some cold meat and cheese. By the time she got to the party she was very thirsty, and she had some of Josiah’s Calistoga water, which tasted good. It was interesting being the soberest (except for Josiah) person at a party.

The drunkest person there is Nicholas, the only former lover of Clover’s (again excepting Josiah) who is present—so much for malevolent plans. Nicholas is satisfactorily drunk, but he has come alone; he and his wife have recently separated.

Clover watches Josiah watching Nicholas, who has risen, with considerable difficulty, from his cushion on the floor, and is lurching in the direction of the bathroom, and Clover thinks what she has not quite dared to put into words before: Josiah is a genuinely mean person—he truly enjoys other people’s discomfort.

She wonders if this was always true. She thinks not, but then when she knew him they drank so much that it is hard to remember. Maybe, she thinks, he’s mean because he doesn’t work anymore—he plays around with people instead? Maybe he used to get drunk to dissolve his meanness?

“I do hope Nicholas hasn’t gone to the bathroom to shave,” Josiah says, and he and Hope laugh. Possibly they notice that Clover isn’t joining in, for then Hope says, “Clover, I hardly know you as a Calistoga drinker.”

A mild enough remark, but as Clover looks at Hope she sees in Hope’s doll-blue eyes a startling intensity of venom. She wishes I would vanish, go away, would maybe kill myself, thinks Clover.

Someone has put on a record, an old Beatles album. The first song has a lively, attractive beat, and several couples get up from the floor to dance, some drunkenly, but others with real expertise, this being the era of a disco-dancing craze. Clover watches Josiah frown; he doesn’t like dancing at parties.

Another song comes on, dreamy, romantic, and more people get up to their feet.

Josiah says to Clover, “But why aren’t you dancing, my lady in red? I’m sure if you could rescue Nicholas from the bathroom he’d be delighted.” And to Hope he says, “Clover in her day was famous as a dancer.”

Clover, who at best has been a mediocre dancer, made awkward by shyness about her height, is genuinely incredulous. “Josiah, how can you say that? We never danced—”

“We didn’t? I thought we had.” Josiah laughs in a private way, then frowns, looking at Hope. Clover understands that this would be something he has told Hope about her, Clover the wonderful dancer. What else has he said? No wonder Hope hates her.

Nicholas emerges from the bathroom, looking pale and sober. He takes his leave.

The party, then, from every point of view, has been a failure, neither the loud disaster that Hope and Josiah had envisioned, nor, in anyone else’s terms, a pleasant party. Although just possibly some of the dancers had a better time than they were supposed to.

And although nothing terrible has happened to Clover, except her unhappy perception of her friends, she is suddenly afflicted with the severest, most terrible cold wave of loneliness, pervasive, penetrating. She almost thinks of chasing after Nicholas, who also looked lonely. The idea of going home alone is quite unbearable, and how can she bear the rest of her life?

Nevertheless, she does go home alone; very soberly she drives across the black night city to her solitary flat on Leavenworth Street.

As she lets herself in and then double-locks the door behind her, the phone begins to ring. She imagines that it must be Josiah, who has sometimes called to go over a party with her—again. And just now not wanting such a conversation, Clover almost does not answer, but then, out of old habit, she does answer, and it is not Josiah but Gregory.

“I do apologize to call so late,” he says. “But my party was so borrrring, and I thought perhaps to save the evening with a small brandy with you, that I bring to your house?”

“Oh Gregory, that’s the best idea I’ve heard for months.”

Hope and Josiah sit in their scarcely furnished living room; the windows still are bare, everywhere exposing the room and its occupants to the windy black night, and the groaning sound of foghorns from the bay.

“Clover is getting to be less and less of a good party person, don’t you think?” asks Hope, in a tentative way.

“She’s becoming very tiresome,” Josiah says, decisively. “I do hope the poor thing doesn’t imagine that not drinking is fashionable.”

“About as fashionable as that dress she wore.”

They laugh, momentarily pleased with each other.

“Actually I’m afraid she’s in pretty bad shape,” Josiah pronounces, professorially. “Did you notice the look on her face as she was leaving? However, not being, au fond , a charitable person, I can’t stand friends in bad shape. Unless, of course, I have put them there.”

Yawning and stretching, Josiah gets up, and Hope follows him toward their bed.